How Blindsgalore.com bridged a communication gap and doubled search revenue

In selling window treatments online, Blindsgalore.com found that while the industry has one name for a product, consumers may search for it under a different name. Adjusting product page copy boosted search results and revenue.

Online retailer Blindsgalore.com saw its revenue from natural search marketing efforts double after adjusting the copy on its product pages to bridge the gap between how shoppers search for window treatments and the different language used by the industry to describe many of those same items, vice president of marketing Sarah Cook Perkinson tells Internet Retailer.

As part of a benchmarking exercise when Blindsgalore started working with Avenue A/Razorfish Search on search marketing, the agency looked at the number of searches on major engines over the previous 120 days for about 50 words relevant to Blindsgalore’s business. It found that the industry and consumers in some cases used different language to describe the same products, leading to missed connections that affected search rankings, click-through, and sales.

For example, what the industry calls “woven wood shades” are called “bamboo shades” by many consumers and in fact, “bamboo shades” is searched four times as much as “woven wood shades.” Similarly, “cordless” shades are searched for as “cord-free" by some shoppers, while a shade feature officially called “top down bottom up” – meaning consumers can open the shade from the top or the bottom – is described six different ways by the six major manufacturers that fabricate them, according to Perkinson.

“It becomes a copywriting challenge,” she says. “You try to improve your rankings and be relevant to consumers based on the search terms they use. But on the other hand, you don’t want to fall prey to the fact that those aren’t the correct terms.”

Avenue A/Razorfish Search and Blindsgalore addressed the issue by creating page content that delivers a natural search listing that shows both “woven wood shades” and “bamboo shades” in the same headline. The listing clicks through to a category landing page identified as “woven wood shades” that leads with a brief paragraph explaining that the product also goes by the other name. The company also used this strategy in adjusting copy for other key search terms.

“Interestingly, we haven’t seen a lot of additional traffic, but we are getting people who are more qualified coming in from organic search because of this effort,” says Perkinson. “Though the sheer volume isn’t higher, the average order is higher.”